Pagan Portals - Magic for Hedge Witches: Sourcing Ingredients, Connection, Spell Building

Preface

Magic is a significant part of my personal pathway. When I think of magic as a hedge-riding hedge witch, I think of the forests, mountains, fields, plains, and rivers and seas. Magic is within nature and I bring nature into my personal magical practices whether I am collecting twigs, leaves, pebbles, glass and more, or in hedge riding where I travel the forests and mountains of the other realms searching for answers to everyday problems. In hedge riding I use magic in conjunction with divination and healing, but my general magical practices are eclectic and rooted in folk magic.

Folk magic has on occasion been labeled primitive as if it has no value. Needless to say, those of us who practice folk magic know that it does. Regarding intent, what you put into it is what you get out of it, and folk magic can yield the same results as ceremonial magic. In addition, even the simplest of spells can have a breadth of knowledge behind it.

Whichever type of magic you practice, it requires a period of learning; it is not something you achieve overnight. Magical training, in fact, can be compared to an apprenticeship – intense study and practice. This is often self-taught, in that competency in skills is built up over time, more often years. There will certainly be reading involved. Strengthening your intuition is another important element. Learning about your ingredients, their qualities and purpose, and connecting to them is another. All this will help you become more competent in practicing magic.

Magic is experiential, so you do need to practice and, over time, develop the proficiency you need for it to be effective. However, it does not end there. Your magical training and education are ongoing – always seeking, always learning new skills.

I am a hedge witch and hedge witches are by nature solitary and their individual paths vary. It is difficult therefore to tailor a book to suit all hedge witches or, indeed, solitary witches on any pathway. However, I have based the practical side of this book on folk magic which incorporates much in the way of natural ingredients and elements of nature, and magic in hedge riding. Together I term them hedge magic. This is the third book in the Hedge Witch series following on from the Pagan Portals guides Hedge Witchcraft and Hedge Riding.

If you are a hedge witch interested in magic and at the start of that journey, or a curious green, hearth, kitchen witch, or anyone interested in magic, then I hope that you will find something of use. All I can do within my books is to share my own magical experiences and practices gained over twenty-seven years and during more than two decades as a hedge witch.

My approach in this book is to demonstrate the processes I go through in using magic and creating spells. You will find suggestions on how to source spells, how to source ingredients and connect with them, ritual, practical exercises, useful correspondences, familiars, and how to put a spell together from your own recipes, so that you have a good grounding in the rudiments of hedge magic. For hedge witches, the last section is how to use magic in hedge riding.

There are many books written about magic and some of the content of this book will correspond with those. However, I hope you also find something new here and aspects of working with magic you have not previously explored.

A big thank you goes to everyone at John Hunt Publishing and Moon Books as well as my family and friends who supported me during the writing and publishing of this guide.

Harmonia Saille

The Rudiments of Hedge Magic

What is Hedge Magic?

My personal magical practice is a blend of folk magic and magic within hedge riding. The two together I term as hedge magic. Magic in hedge riding can be useful in helping you to decide the core of a problem and what type of spell to use to correct it. A hedge riding journey can also reveal to you what other elements you might add to your spell to enhance it and for help in resolving your dilemmas.

The practical side of my magical practice is based on folk magic. Folk magic is an uncomplicated magic brewed up by cunning folk, the witch, or others. Uncomplicated does not mean uninteresting or requiring little learning though. Folk magic is a craft taught or self-taught over years and nowadays is often gleaned from or based on the ancient mixed in with modern knowledge or practices.

In past times, superstitions, spells, and charms were passed down not through secret covens of witches but through the ordinary population and almost certainly by way of the cunning man or woman. Folk magic was magical practice for the ordinary folk. This is demonstrated below.

King James I (King James VI of Scotland) as the character Philomathes wrote in his book Daemonolgie (Book I, Chapter V, 1597):

But how prooue ye now that these charmes or vnnaturall practicques are vnlawfull: For so, many honest & merrie men & women haue publicklie practized some of them, that I thinke if ye would accuse them al of Witch-craft, ye would affirme more nor ye will be beleeued in.

The Early Modern English text is difficult to understand but roughly translated it asks – how can you prove that witchcraft is unnatural and unlawful when so many ordinary men and women openly practice it? In writing Daemonolgie, King James sought to argue logically that anyone who practiced witchcraft, in his opinion, worked with the devil. The discourse between his two characters, the skeptical Philomathes and the supporter Epistemon, he believed would prove among other things that practitioners of all forms of magic were linked to the devil.

Needless to say, he supported witch-hunts, though as the prosecutions increased and got out of hand he later ...revoked the standing commissions against witchcraft.¹

However, to return to the subject of magic and the common folk, we learn something from this discourse. When King James writes about how many honest and merrie men and women publicly used charms, he confirms that in fact using charms was common within the population. He also puts forward that many more women than men practiced magic (in his opinion because they were weaker and more susceptible to the devil’s influence). In reality, women would have been likely to include healing and herbal medicines as part of their household skills, some of which were quasi-magical.²

A cure for an illness for instance might involve healing herbs but also a charm. During those times, people naturally became more careful in using folk magic for fear of being prosecuted, but the practice did continue over the following centuries even if perhaps not as openly. The people who did practice might not have considered themselves to be witches or consider what they did necessarily to be witchcraft. Healing and magic were more often seen as one.

Even among the educated, a good example of someone mixing medicine and the occult is 17th-century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper, who combined astrology with herbal medicine (more about Culpeper in the chapter on Ingredients). Often called the father of contemporary medicine, he did offer free services to the general public. He was tried and acquitted of witchcraft in 1642, during the reign of Charles I. Unfortunately, he died young, at 37, from tuberculosis. His legacy remains with us in his recordings of herbs and their uses. His book Culpeper’s Complete Herbal is still available to buy. I bought my Wordsworth Edition cheaply from a small bookshop in the 90s.

Nowadays, we are lucky in the West that we can openly practice magic. Practitioners might call themselves witches or may follow another pathway that involves the practice of magic or might consider themselves a practitioner of magic without a set pathway. You still do not have to be a witch to use a charm. People often use charms without realizing it. Turning over a silver coin on the new moon is a charm, as is the sprig of heather you bought for luck from a gypsy and wearing the angel pendant that someone bought you to wear for protection or healing.

When we practice folk magic, we are drawing from an age-old tradition. Just like in past times, we do not need a lot of expensive equipment though that is entirely up to the practitioner. For those on a budget or those who prefer to use recycled or natural items, supplies can be built up to great satisfaction. You might though wish to purchase a few items such as charcoal for burning incense, herbs if you do not have the facilities to grow them yourself, and candles (I recommend beeswax, which now come in a variety of colors. You can also make your own). Expenses are also likely to be incurred buying reference books. However, you can make use of items you already have too – dishes, candle holders, knives for cutting and so forth.

Where possible (regarding ingredients) items of biodegradable material should be found and used, so that at some point they become part of the natural earth rather than lying around for centuries littering it. There is something gratifying in seeking out and finding natural ingredients along with using natural amulets and making personal connections with them. This will bring about more satisfying, effective, and powerful magical results.

In modern times, too many things are done for us for convenience. Purchasing complete magical spells that you have not put together yourself defeats the object of crafting. I cannot imagine buying a magical herb mix and not knowing what was in it and what qualities the individual herbs